Are you a Skype User ? - Things to know.
Skype which provides free voice calls across desktops is a great tool which every one will love to use due to the quality of the voice and the lowest possible cost [RS 000/-] associated in it.
If you are on a limited usage [limited by download size] broadband connection with a good speed and a powerful computer then you should know these things.
As per the skype architecture, “Any Skype Client (SC) with a public IP address having sufficient CPU, memory, and network bandwidth is a candidate to become a super node (SN)”.
When your computer become a super node, the near by machines will start using your machine as a local server for locating other machines [ users ] around the area. By this way, your computer will start getting request from the outside environment increasing your data transfer. In this case some of your CPU cycles will be used by skype for doing some jobs unrelated to you. I am not sure about what is the amount of data transfer done by skype due to this super nodification of our computer.
Also when you are putting a conference with a couple of your friends, then the flow of traffic will be as shown in the following diagram. If you happen to be a powerful computer, then ultimately you will be come the A and start transferring data between your friend B and C. This will double the data transfer of yours.
It happened that skype occupied my port 80 also. By this way, if you are running apache or some thing on this port for some other purpose that will become inaccessible. This happens mostly when you have the automatic sign in option enabled in skype.
By default the voice calls needs more bytes for the voice data transfer. Please make sure that you are in an appropriate broadband plan before you choose to use voice calls.
Cheers - Ranjith
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